Swatty: A Story of Real Boys

So, while she was standing by her desk she sort of picked at her dress on her chest a couple of times the way I had been picking at my shirt front, and I was glad to think she had a sulphur bag, too, like I had. It was nice to think we both had the same, only she didn’t know I had one.

So I whistled a little whistle – “Wheet!” – and she looked at me. I guess she smiled at me. I felt mighty brave. So I started with the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, pointing at my eye for “I,” and rubbing my hands across each other for “h” and I spelled out “I have a” and she nodded her head at each word to show she knew what I was spelling. So I spelled out “sulphur,” because what I wanted to tell her was “I have a sulphur bag, too,” but when I got to “sulph” she shook her head and I had to begin again, because she couldn’t understand.

I was standing up and she was standing up and she was standing so she looked right at me, and I spelled and spelled. Sometimes I began at the beginning and spelled “I have sulph” and sometimes I spelled “sulphur” over and over, but she just shook her head each time and smiled and waited. She was awfully interested, and more and more scholars came in, and pretty soon they were all watching me and trying to spell what I was spelling, but nobody did, I guess. Mamie Little got awfully interested and she was mighty eager to find out what I was trying to spell. Then, all at once, I knew why she couldn’t tell; it was because she didn’t have any sulphur bag on. So, all at once, I felt mighty cheap! There she was, thinking I had something awfully important I was trying to tell her, and she didn’t have a sulphur bag, and I was making a fool of her before the whole school, because what would she think of me telling her I had a sulphur bag if she didn’t have one? And making such a fuss about it, as if it was something wonderful like telling her her father was dead, or something.

Then, all of sudden, I remembered I was going to her yard the next day, to help her with her playhouse, and I felt worse than ever. The first thing she would want to know would be what I had tried to spell out, and if I told her she would think I was crazy to make so much fuss about such a thing, and if I did not tell her she would be mad at me forever and maybe talk about me to the other girls. I couldn’t bear to think about it and I couldn’t help thinking about it. So, after school, I hurried away as fast as I could, and when Swatty caught up with me I told him I had changed my mind and that I would go fishing with him. So that is how Mamie Little helped catch Bony’s burglar. If it hadn’t been for Mamie Little not knowing how to spell “sulphur” I wouldn’t have gone fishing, and Swatty wouldn’t have gone either, and the burglar wouldn’t have been caught.

So Saturday morning I got in enough wood for all day and it wasn’t much, because it was summer and the kitchen wood was all I had to get in. Then I hunted up a new tin can, because when we get through fishing we always throw the old one into the Slough, because by that time the worms that are left are pretty; bad. Sometimes, if the can has been in the sun, they are even worse than that. So I got a new can and went around to the other side of the barn and the spade was there yet, from the last time I had dug worms, so I dug some more.

Just then Swatty came into the yard and he was ready to start. So my mother came to the back door with some sandwiches and things in a box, and I said:

“Aw! I don’t want to carry a big box like that! Aw! I just want a couple of sandwiches in my pocket!”

“Georgie!” she said. “You take this box! You ‘ll be glad enough of everything that’s in it!”

Me and Swatty went up over the hill and down past the Catlic church to South Riverbank and we stopped at the pump on the corner and had a good drink and cooled off our feet in the mud under the pump spout, because the sidewalks were hot.

The water in the Slough wasn’t high and it wasn’t low. Once the Slough ran through to the river at this end but now it was all filled in with sawdust from the sawmill, and a big conveyor blowpipe kept blowing more sawdust into the Slough from the mill, and all the surface of the Slough was floating sawdust. Then, a little further along, it was water-lily leaves. Then, further along, it was plain Slough for miles and miles and miles.

The water was three or four feet down from the top of the bank and the bank was covered with pretty good grass, and all along the Slough there was a path worn, because kids and fellows had fished in the Slough ever since there was a Riverbank, and before that the Indians had fished in it, I guess. Everywhere, close to the edge of the bank in the shade of the trees, there were places worn smooth-like an old chair seat – where fellows had sat and fished for years and years until they were regular fishing places. When you saw one of them you knew it was a good fishing place and that there was a bent root, all worn smooth and sometimes almost worn in two, part way down the bank, to rest your feet on.

It was all quiet and still, like a fishing place should be, except for the “urr-urr” of the mills away off, or the “caw caw!” of crows or, once in a while, somebody knocking the ashes out of a pipe against a root, across the Slough or a little splash when somebody caught a fish. Then everything would be quiet again.

So me and Swatty walked along down the path, because we thought we would go as far as we had ever been, or farther, this time. Once we stopped and ate ‘most all of my lunch. It was nine o’clock but we were mighty hungry. Then we went on.

We got two or three miles down the Slough and most of the fishing places were empty there and I wanted to stop but Swatty said: “Aw! come on! Let’s go on down to the point!” so we went.

The point wasn’t much of a point but you felt more out in the Slough when you were on it. There was a big water maple at the end of it, with fine roots to sit on, and I sat on some of the roots and fished and Swatty sat on some others and fished. It was good and hot and the Slough smelled warm and weedy and we liked it, because that was part of the regular fishing smell. There was just a little ripple and the corks bobbed up and down gently and we set our poles among the roots and just leaned back and felt good. Over across the Slough was another point, but more rounded and bigger, and it was green and cool looking, with grass and three big elms on it, and back in the fields a cow’s bell jingled once in a while, and the crows cawed, and the sawmill hummed away off in the distance, and it got hotter and hotter. I watched my cork until it seemed to lose itself in the ripples and my eyes got sleepier and sleepier and, the next thing I knew, I woke up and Swatty wasn’t there! Neither was my cork!

The first thing I did was give my pole a yank and out came a jim-dandy goggle-eye sunfish, just about as good as I ever caught. I held him so the stickers wouldn’t sting me and got the hook out of him and strung him on a piece of twine and I was tying the string to a root so the goggle-eye would be in the water when somebody down the Slough a ways hawked, clearing the tobacco out of his throat, and I looked around and saw Swatty coming back to the point, not making any noise. He held up a finger for me to be quiet and then he climbed out onto the roots of the maple and sat down.

“I caught a dandy goggle-eye, Swatty,” I whispered.

He leaned over toward me.

“Don’t make any noise!” he whispered. “Bony is over on that point.”

I looked and I saw him. It was pretty far across the Slough and Bony couldn’t hear us if we whispered.

“Well, he can’t hear us, can he?” I whispered back.

“No,” Swatty said and then he climbed over beside me and sat on a root. “There’s a man down there,” he said and he pointed.

“I heard him spit.” I whispered. I began to feel scary because there was n’t any use for Swatty to be so whispery unless there was something to feel scary at, was there?

“He’s got Bony’s father’s signet ring,” Swatty whispered. “Anyway, I guess he’s got it. He’s got a ring like what Bony says his father’s ring is like. He’s fishing and he’s got the ring on his thumb.”

Well, then I knew what Swatty had done. While I was asleep he had sneaked down to see what luck the man was having and he had seen the ring.

“Gee!” I said.

Swatty sat awhile with his forehead wrinkled and looked at the Slough and he was thinking.

“Garsh!” he said; “I’d like to be the one to get that fifty dollars. I wish I knew for certain it is Bony’s father’s ring. Fifty dollars is a lot of money. If I had it I’d put it in the bank.”

“What bank?” I asked him. “The Savings Bank or the Riverbank National?”

“I guess maybe I’d put half in one and half in the other,” Swatty said. “Then if one bank busted I’d have half left, anyway.”

“Well, if one did bust maybe you’d get some of your money back,” I said. “My father had money in a bank once and it busted and he got part of it back.”

“That’s so,” Swatty said. “If I put in twenty-five and the bank busted maybe I’d get back fifteen of it. That would be forty dollars I’d have, even if the bank did bust. I’d like to have it.”

So we sat there awhile and the crows cawed and the cowbell jingled and it was quiet, but we didn’t catch any more fish.

“If we hadn’t got mad at Bony he would be over here,” Swatty said after a while.

“Well, what if he was?” I said.

“Well, he could sneak up and see if that ring is his father’s ring, couldn’t he?” said Swatty.

“Well, then,” I said, “why don’t you call to him to come over?”

As soon as I said it I knew it wasn’t much to say, because it was two or three miles back to the end of the Slough and four or six miles Bony would have to go to get around to us, and he wouldn’t come anyway because he’d think maybe we wanted to lick him or something. And if we shouted what we wanted him for, the burglar would hear us and would get away from there mighty quick.

“I’m going over and get Bony.”

“How are you going to get him?” I asked.

“I’m going to row over,” he said. “You stay here and watch that man and I’ll go over and get Bony.” Well, I guessed that if he said he would, he’d find some way to row over whether there was a boat or not, because that was the way Swatty was. When he wanted to do anything he did it. So I looked down the Slough and I could see the end of the man’s fishpole sticking out over the water and his cork floating and Swatty climbed onto the bank and took his fishpole and went up the Slough. He had to go pretty far before he found a boat and the boat he found was not much good. It was an old flatboat and one end was busted some and it was water-logged. Swatty had to stay away up in one end to keep the busted end out of water and he paddled the best he could with a piece of fence board. He paddled out to the middle of the Slough and stopped there and pretended to fish a while and then he paddled a little nearer Bony and pretended to fish a while longer, and then he paddled to shore near where Bony was and got out of the flatboat and went up to Bony. For a while they sat together and I guessed Swatty was talking to Bony about the ring and the fifty dollars and the man, and coaxing Bony to come to our side of the Slough and see if it was his father’s ring the man had on his thumb.

So all the time I kept looking three ways – at Bony and Swatty, and at my cork, and at the end of the man’s fishpole – and all at once when I looked the man’s fishpole wasn’t there. It was gone!

So I looked harder, but it was gone, no matter how hard I looked. So then I knew Swatty would give me a whale of a licking if he came back and found out I had let the man get away while he was fetching Bony, and I climbed off the root and up the bank and I was just starting to run, to go where the man had been, when I saw him. He was right in the middle of the path near where he had been fishing and he was bent down with his back toward me, picking up fish, because the string he had had them strung on had broken. He was stringing them again and as he picked them up I could see the ring on his thumb.

Pretty soon he had all his fish strung again and then he straightened up and took a chew of tobacco and looked up into a tree that was right there, and I looked up and saw he had put his fishpole up the tree, so I guessed maybe he fished there pretty often, or was coming back sometime. So then he slouched off. I watched him.

He was big but he wasn’t very old. Maybe he was twenty or thirty. His clothes were pretty old and faded and he looked lazy in the arms and legs and when he walked he walked tired. He went down the path a ways and then he climbed over the fence there was along there and I went across the path and watched him from behind another tree. It was a ploughed field there and he walked in a furrow clear across the field to the road that was on the other side and climbed over another fence. So I climbed up on my fence and watched to see where he would go. There were three little houses across the road and he went into the one on the end toward town. So then I guessed that was where he lived and I got down off my fence and went back to the point.

Swatty and Bony were in the boat and Swatty was paddling it as well as he could but it was only halfway across. Then, all at once, Swatty began to paddle harder. He paddled as hard as he could and then, I guess, he said something to Bony and Bony began to bail out the boat as fast as he could. Then Bony began to cry. I could hear him where I was and Swatty shouted at him and looked over his shoulder to see how far he had to paddle. Then Swatty dropped his paddle stick and began to bail with his hat like he was crazy. And before I could see it, almost, the old, rotten flatboat took a dive and Swatty and Bony were in the water. Bony yelled and went under but Swatty came right up, spitting water and kicking out with his hands. It was a good thing he was barefoot.

Well, Swatty looked all around as soon as he got the water out of his eyes but he couldn’t see Bony. So he dived for him.

There’s one place nobody ever swims and that is the Slough. All you have to do is to look down into it anywhere and you know why. All you see when you look down is seaweed – tons and oceans of it – all tangled and twisty, and old trees and branches sticking around in it to get caught onto. When the Slough is low you can’t row on it because the seaweed grabs your oars and holds on like it was some mean man trying to drown your boat. It scares you. And all in among the seaweed are tough weeds and water-lily stems and water vines. There have been plenty of boys drowned in the Slough, I guess. So Bony had got caught in the weeds and vines and things.

Pretty soon Swatty came to the top but he didn’t have Bony, but his arms were covered with seaweed. He spit out water and scraped the seaweed off his arms and then he took his nose in his hand and dived again. That time he got him. He got him by one leg and he swam for shore dragging Bony behind him and the seaweed strung out behind Bony. His head was all covered with it.

I was crying pretty hard, I guess. So Swatty told me to shut up and he turned Bony over on his back and began scraping the seaweed off his face, and Bony’s face was scratched a good deal from the rough weeds and maybe from where I had dragged him up the bank on his face. I thought he was dead but Swatty didn’t. He leaned down and listened to Bony’s heart and said all he needed was to be pumped out. So he started to pump him out.

Swatty got down on his knees a-straddle of Bony and took Bony’s hands in his and pumped him the way he had heard you ought to pump a drowned person. He pushed Bony’s arms clear back until they touched the ground over his head and then he drew them forward until they touched the ground again, and he kept right at it. Every once in a while Swatty would shake his head to shake the water out of his ears but he went right on pumping. So I stood and blubbered.

Well, no water pumped out of Bony. Swatty pumped and pumped but no water came out of Bony’s mouth and pretty soon Swatty stopped and took a couple of deep breaths.

“Garsh!” he said; “I thought he would pump easier than that!”

So he pumped him again a few times and then stopped again. It looked as if it wasn’t any use.

“I know what’s the matter,” Swatty said. “We’ve got to prime him. There ain’t enough water in him to start unless he’s primed. When our cistern is low at home we have to prime it before the water starts pumping up, and that’s what we’ve got to do.”

Well, I guessed that was so. Our cistern pump was that way too. So I took my bait can and washed it out good and clean and got a can of water and I primed Bony. I poured a little water in Bony’s mouth and Swatty pumped.

“Prime him some more,” Swatty said.

So I primed him some more. It didn’t seem to do any good.

“Aw, prime him a lot!” Swatty said, so I poured all the water I had in the can into Bony’s mouth and went and got some more.

“Keep on!” Swatty said. “He’ll start pretty soon. We’ve got to get the water pumped out of him.”

So I was priming Bony again when somebody behind us said:

“What are you trying to do to that boy?”

I looked around, and Swatty looked around. It was the man with the ring on his thumb.

“He’s drowned,” Swatty said, “and we’re trying to pump him out.”

The man took ahold of Swatty’s shoulder and threw him almost into the fence. He stooped down and grabbed Bony and threw him across a big maple root, face down, and began to pump and pretty soon Bony began to pump out. The man pumped him pretty dry and then he put him in the sun and began to rub him good and after a while Bony opened his eyes. To see him open his eyes was one of the best things I ever saw. I was mighty glad I had helped to undrown him.

Bony was pretty much wilted. Me and Swatty didn’t know how we would ever get him home but we didn’t have to.

“About one more can of water in this kid and he would have been gone for good,” the man said. “Now, you help him onto my back and I’ll get him home for you.”

We got Bony onto his back and Bony hung around his neck and the man held Bony’s legs under his arms. He climbed the fence with him that way and started off across the ploughed field and me and Swatty went after him. We didn’t even think about taking our fishpoles along. We went across the field and the man stopped at his house and called his mother and she gave Bony some whiskey in hot water while the man went over to a farmer’s house and got a team and a wagon. So, while he was gone Swatty said to Bony:

“Is it?”

He meant the cardinal’s signet ring, and was it it.

“Yes, it’s it,” Bony said, but not very loud. He was pretty much drowned yet.

So we all went back to town in the farmer’s wagon; me and Bony and Swatty and the man and the farmer kid that was driving. So Swatty sat with the farmer kid and talked to him.

“That man saved Bony’s life,” Swatty said. “Who is he?”

“Him? He’s Lazy Joe,” the farmer kid said. “He’s Lazy Joe Mulligan. He don’t do nothing but fish and loaf.”

So then Swatty knew who the burglar was.

We drove up to town and Swatty told the farmer kid where to drive and pretty soon we came to Bony’s house. The man, Lazy Joe Mulligan, looked pretty funny, you bet, when we drove right up to the house he had burglared. He put his hand in his pocket and when he pulled it out the ring was gone.

“Come on!” Swatty said to me.

“Where to?” I asked him.

“Down to Bony’s father’s to get that fifty dollars,” Swatty said. So we went.

Well, I guess we forgot to tell Bony’s father about Bony being drowned and pumped out. We just told him we had the burglar up at his house and that we wanted the fifty dollars, and he rushed out and up the street and got a policeman and hurried to his house. Lazy Joe was there yet, telling Bony’s mother how he had pumped Bony out, but the farmer kid was n’t there, because Bony’s mother had sent him down to get Bony’s father. She wanted Bony’s father to give Lazy Joe five dollars or something for pumping Bony out.

Then me and Swatty and Bony’s father and the policeman came in and Bony’s father was saying: “Officer, arrest him! He’s the man that stole my property,” while Bony’s mother was saying: “Edward, give him five dollars or something! He’s the man that saved your son’s life.”

“How is that?” asked Bony’s father, and he was pretty much mixed; “I thought this was the burglar.”

“He is the burglar,” said Swatty. “He’s got the cardinal’s ring in his pocket right now. I seen it, and Georgie seen it, and Bony seen it.”

Then Lazy Joe didn’t know what to say. Then he said:

“I’ll give everything back.”

So that was how they fixed it. Bony’s father saved fifty-five dollars. He saved the five dollars he ought to have given Lazy Joe for saving Bony’s life and he saved the fifty dollars he ought to have given Swatty. So all me and Swatty knew next was that we were out on the street and we didn’t have anything to show for catching the burglar. All we had was what Bony’s father said. What he said was:

“Get out of here, you little rats! Be thankful you haven’t my child’s death on your shoulders!”

Well, I was going, but Swatty stood right there.

“No, sir!” he said. “I won’t go. You can cheat us out of fifty dollars reward, maybe, but you’ve got to give back the diamond ring this burglar has that belongs to Herb and Fan. You got to give that back, because it ain’t yours.”

“Have you got a ring like that?” the policeman asked Lazy Joe.

“Yes,” he said, and he took it out of one of his pockets. So Swatty took it and we skipped out. We went right over to my house, because it was dark by now, and I went to Fan and told her we had her ring for her. I didn’t know what I would say when she asked me where I got it, but she didn’t ask. She just went to her drawer and got out fifteen dollars and gave it to me and didn’t say anything. Only when I went out of the room I heard her bed creak sudden, and I knew she had sort of thrown herself down on it, broken-hearted, like in a novel.

VII. THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Well, it looked like that vacation would be a sort of nice one – at the beginning of it, anyway – because Fan had taken mother’s advice and gone over to Chicago to visit Aunt Beatrice, and Mamie Little had gone down to Betzville to be on her uncle’s farm awhile, because it would do her good.

When Fan went she went in a closed carriage as far as the depot, because she was so pale and peaked she didn’t want anybody to see her and have Herb hear of it. She sent him his ring back, I guess, before she went.

I thought it was pretty mean that Fan had to be mostly sick like that, while Herb was as well as ever and having a good time with Miss Carter, as far as I knew, but it wasn’t any of my business. Mother said she guessed Fan would get over it, because she was young yet and, goodness knew! there wasn’t so much difference between one man and another, but that if people like Bony’s mother didn’t stop coming over and talking about it she would go mad. And I guess that was so because Bony’s mother is some talker. I ‘ve heard her talk.

I heard her talk about Fan one day, and it made me sick. And then she talked about Bony, and it made me sicker.

I was sitting on the edge of our porch waiting for Swatty and Bony. I was tying a piece of salt pork on the bottom of my foot to keep from getting the “lockjaw, because I had stepped on a rusty nail, and I thought maybe I had better scrape some of the sand out of the nail hole before I put the pork on, so it would heal quicker, and I was scraping it out with my barlow knife. That’s how I happened to be sitting on the edge of the porch; but Bony’s mother and my mother were at the other end of the porch. So then Bony’s mother said:

“No, I have never used a switch on my son. I have never struck him with my hand, nor has his father. We don’t believe in it. We use moral suasion.” That means they jaw Bony. They corner him up somewhere and jaw him until he blubbers, the way the teachers jaw the girls when they get too big to paddle, and then Bony’s mother blubbers and makes Bony kiss her and say that now he will be a better and truer boy and keep the Ten Commandments and not smoke com silk any more. Or whatever it is.

So my mother didn’t say anything because when she thinks I need it she wales me good. Anyway, I’d rather be waled ten times a day than be moral-suasioned like Bony, and so would Swatty, and so would all the kids, and so would Bony. But my mother didn’t say anything because Bony’s mother was a caller and you don’t fight with callers until after they’ve got you so perfectly exasperated you just have to speak your mind.